Comment by shepherdjerred

I first tried btrfs 15 years ago with Linux 2.6.33-rc4 if I recall. It developed an unlinkable file within 3 days, so I stopped using it. Later, I found ZFS. It had a few less significant problems, but I was a CS student at the time and I thought I could fix them since they seemed minor in comparison to the issue I had with btrfs, so over the next 18 months, I solved all of the problems that it had that bothered me and sent the patches to be included in the then ZFSOnLinux repository. My effort helped make it production ready on Linux. I have used ZFS ever since and it has worked well for me.

If btrfs had been in better shape, I would have been a btrfs contributor. Unfortunately for btrfs, it not only was in bad shape back then, but other btrfs issues continued to bite me every time I tried it over the years for anything serious (e.g. frequent ENOSPC errors when there is still space). ZFS on the other hand just works. Myself and many others did a great deal of work to ensure it works well.

The main reason for the difference is that ZFS had a very solid foundation, which was achieved by having some fantastic regression testing facilities. It has a userland version that randomly exercises the code to find bugs before they occur in production and a test suite that is run on every proposed change to help shake out bugs.

ZFS also has more people reviewing proposed changes than other filesystems. The Btrfs developers will often state that there is a significant man power difference between the two file systems. I vaguely recall them claiming the difference was a factor of 6.

Anyway, few people who use ZFS regret it, so I think you will find you like it too.

ZFS has been in production use for almost 20 years now. BTRFS is not fully fit for production, according to BTRFS: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid5...

Some simple use-cases are arguably production ready with BTRFS, YMMV.

btrfs has similar aims to ZFS, but is far less mature. i used it for my root partitions due to it not needing DKMS, but had many troubles. i used it in a fairly simple way, just a mirror. one day, of the drives in the array started to have issues- and btrfs fell on it's face. it remounted everything read-only if i remember correctly, and would not run in degraded mode by default. even mdraid would do better than this without checksumming and so forth. ZFS also likewise, says that the array is faulted, but of course allows it to be used. the fact the default behavior was not RAID, because it's literally missing the R part for reading the data back, made me lose any faith in it. i moved to ZFS and haven't had issues since. there is much more of a community and lots of good tooling around it.

I used Btrfs for a few years but switched away a couple years ago. I also had one or two incidents with Btrfs where some weirdness happened, but I was able to recover everything in the end. Overall I liked the flexibility of Btrfs, but mostly I found it too slow.

I use ZFS on Arch Linux and overall have had no problems with it so far. There's more customization and methods to optimize performance. My one suggestion is to do a lot of research and testing with ZFS. There is a bit of a learning curve, but it's been worth the switch for me.